from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Parents everywhere are usually scolding their kids for playing with their food, but maybe kids are right to look at food as building materials and decorating items. Here are just a few unconventional uses for edible goods.

from the wow dept

If you're an internet "old timer" who paid attention to the early "spam wars," you know the name of Sanford "Spamford" Wallace. While plenty of people have been described as "the spam king," he was the original kingpin (starting in the junk fax business, and then moving on to email in the mid-90s). He was proud of being called the spam king... but after the business started to become risky, he claimed that he "retired" in the late 90s, and (partially) owned a nightclub. However, the lure of the spam was apparently too much. He jumped into the spyware business and ran into trouble with the FTC. Things got weird when Wallace disappeared and his lawyer asked to withdraw from the case, noting that he couldn't reach Wallace. Wallace was hit with a massive fine from the FTC, which it appears he ignored.

He then moved on to spamming MySpace, which got him sued. His strategy was established: he just ignored the lawsuit. The end result? A $234 million fine. Of course, MySpace went downhill and up came Facebook. Facebook sued him in 2009 and won an astounding $711 million. This time, Wallace actually did show up in court, but claimed he was totally bankrupt. We wondered, at the time, if there was actually anything that could be done to stop him, since he seemed to just keep on spamming, and the fines (and some of the cases themselves) being issued against him were just ignored. There were some questions two years ago if he'd finally be brought up on criminal charges, and it appears that's finally happened.

Wallace apparently surrendered to the FBI after an indictment last month. He's now facing 40 years in jail and a potential $2 million fine (which seems like nothing compared to the earlier fines).

Some of the details in the article also suggest that Wallace simply couldn't stay away from Facebook, despite a court order not to access the site at all:

Wallace, who was ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel in 2009 not to access Facebook, was also charged with violating that order by accessing the social network on an airline flight from Las Vegas to New York in April 2009 and by maintaining an account under the name David Sinful-Saturdays Fredericks for a few weeks earlier this year.

I will say that 40 years sounds excessive. However, it also seems clear that he has no interest in following the law when it comes to these things.

from the filter-away dept

Thousands of digital books, called ebooks, are being published through Amazon’s self-publishing system each month. Many are not written in the traditional sense.

Instead, they are built using something known as Private Label Rights, or PLR content, which is information that can be bought very cheaply online then reformatted into a digital book.

These ebooks are listed for sale – often at 99 cents – alongside more traditional books on Amazon’s website, forcing readers to plow through many more titles to find what they want.

The article makes it sound like this is a big problem, calling it "the dark side" of self-publishing, but I don't get it. Assuming no one wants this crap, then it seems likely that Amazon will start to filter it out of any search results or top lists.

There is some slightly more legitimate concern about outright plagiarism, where some of these "spammers" are merely copying other books and then re-branding them and selling them as ebooks. But, once again, this seems like a filter problem more than anything else. In fact, I'm a bit surprised that Amazon doesn't do a basic check to make sure the content of an ebook hasn't already been offered by someone else, and do a further investigation if that's the case. Others have suggested that Amazon charge a small fee to upload a book, as that might prevent spammers from going crazy with such copies, and that could make sense as well. I just have trouble believing that this is such a serious "problem" that it can't easily be stopped.

from the frivolous-lawsuits dept

Ah, class action lawsuits in action. If you want an idea of how the class action lawsuit process is often used for completely ridiculous purposes, just take a look at three separate lawsuits filed by a bunch of California lawyers. Each lawsuit is separate (and embedded below), and all three were pointed out by Eric Goldman. The lawsuits are against Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, and all are basically identical, other than the plaintiff. They're all attempts to file class actions against these companies for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which is supposed to block unsolicited contact to mobile phone lines. In all three cases, the plaintiffs were people who willingly turned on a feature in early April to receive text messages from each of these services. At some later date (probably a few days), each plaintiff chose to no longer receive those text messages, and responded to a message received by texting back "stop." As is quite typical, each of these services sent a message back to confirm that the person no longer wanted to receive such text messages. This is a completely standard procedure. And yet, these lawsuits claim that those messages broke the law, because the second the "stop" message was sent, any and all future messages, even the confirmation message, were unsolicited:

Plaintiff continued to receive text message notifications from Defendant. At
some point Plaintiff decided that he no longer wanted to receive text message
notifications on his cellular telephone from Defendant.
Plaintiff then responded to Defendant’s last text message notification by
replying “stop.”

At this point, Plaintiff withdrew any type of express or implied consent to
receive text message notification to his cellular telephone.

In response to receiving this revocation of consent, Defendant then
immediately sent another, unsolicited, confirmatory text message to Plaintiff’s
cellular telephone.

I can't see any of these lawsuits getting very far, and one would think there should be some sort of sanctions for setting up a situation like this solely for the purpose of filing a class action lawsuit. A confirmation message that the service provider is not to contact you again is hardly an unsolicited contact. It seems like it should be easy to argue that it was very much solicited by the individual issuing the "stop" command. That this law firm filed all three of these identical lawsuits at about the same time, also suggests that the message was very much solicited in that this law firm wanted to receive the confirmation message, solely for the purpose of filing a silly class action lawsuit (or three). The thing is, if this lawsuit goes anywhere, it'll create more of a hassle. Many of us like receiving a confirmation that we've been unsubscribed from something. This is clearly not the intent of the law, and one hopes that the courts will slap this down quickly.

from the don't-mess-with-the-goog dept

Over the weekend there was a fascinating NY Times article about how retailing giant JC Penney apparently had a massive black hat search spam campaign going, which put its homepage at the top of a ton of beneficial searches. In digging into it, the NY Times uncovered a lot of questionable behavior, and Google quickly responded by implementing some sort of "corrective behavior" that sank JC Penney listings. This is slightly less severe than the famous time that Google dumped BMW's domain for a period of time after that company was caught spamming. JC Penney, for its part, denies having authorized such a campaign, and apparently fired the search engine optimization company it had been working with.

Of course, there's all sorts of vague statements in the article, and it's not clear how Google meted out this punishment. Of course, since it's listed as a "manual action," it's going to get some anti-Google folks up in arms about how Google "manually" can and does adjust search results -- a point of anger that has been brought out before. But it's not clear that's actually what's going on, and even if there is a "manual" punishment functionality for spamming the Google index, isn't that a good thing? Shouldn't we want Google to be punishing companies that make the search results worse?

from the that-doesn't-make-any-sense dept

In a ruling that Eric Goldman correctly refers to as "divorced from reality," a California Appeals court has ruled that two advertising firms can be held liable for actions done by their affiliates (and sub-affiliates). In this case, these sub-affiliates sent out spam, advertising things on behalf of the defendants in the case. There were a few legal questions raised by the case, including yet another attempt to see if CAN SPAM really pre-empts state anti-spam laws, which are interesting, but which we won't discuss right now. Instead, I wanted to focus on that one key issue of putting the blame on a company for what a third party does.

This is a key point that we've been raising a lot around here lately, as more and more people look to blame third parties, often because it's (a) easier and (b) those third parties have more money. While I recognize that we all get annoyed by spam, a ruling of this nature is completely misdirected. It means that if you want to get a company in trouble, just send spam advertising their stuff to California residents. Now those firms are liable for your statements even if it had no idea that you were doing this. Goldman warns that this ruling will "generate lots more of wasteful profit-seeking litigation."

Both Venkat and Eric in the link above question how this ruling could survive a Section 230 analysis -- which should present a perfectly valid safe harbor for the two firms in question. It's not clear if either firm even raised a Section 230 defense, but even without that, I'm troubled by the fact that the court didn't seem to comprehend that it was blaming a company for actions of someone they have no control over. The court -- incorrectly -- claims that this could lead to "take a more active role in supervising" actions of affiliates, but as Eric points out, the strict liability standard put forth by the court means that no matter how active a role they take, if one spam message slips through, they're still liable. That doesn't lead to a more active role in supervising, it leads companies to dump such programs altogether:

Because of strict liability, even advertisers who undertake substantial efforts to police their affiliate network ARE STILL LIABLE FOR ANY PROBLEMS CREATED BY AFFILIATES. Maybe the court got confused about what it meant to impose STRICT LIABILITY. In reality, many advertisers won't rely on affiliates at all if they are strictly liable for what they do. I bet this court would view that as a perfectly fine outcome, but the it's disingenuous to say that strict liability will ratchet up the policing effort. A negligence standard might have done that; strict liability squashes the endeavor altogether.

This is definitely a worrisome trend, as we've seen a growing number of courts get tripped up on ideas surrounding third party liability, not recognizing the consequences of those rulings.

from the spam-spam-spam-spam dept

John Nagle, who famously highlighted the massive problems with Craigslist spam a few years ago, alerts us to his latest report, showing how Google's regular listings are getting filled up with Google Places spam (pdf). Apparently, Google integrated its Places offering into Google's regular search back at the end of October, and almost immediately various search engine optimizers (both the "white hats" and the "black hats") almost immediately realized that it was really easy to game the system: you just create a "business" at a fake, but real-sounding, address. Some companies are quite upfront about how to do this:

Set up a listing in Google Maps at an address that does not currently exist. For
example, where there is a 60 Main St., Anytown and a 64 Main St, Anytown and
these represent real addresses. Set up your listing at 62 Main St.

Name your business USKeyword-City, or Keyword-Pro-city or Fictitious name of
person plus keyword for the personal touch.

Create a blog on one of the sites for the purpose of creating a perfect citation for
thousands of listings.

Link build

Give your new listing a sparkling review

Now find an adjacent town and repeat. Again and again and again again

There are even apparently tools on the market that will help you do this. The report notes that this is apparently so effective that the search engine optimizers who usually play by the rules (the "white hat" SEOs) are even making use of it as well. Of course, this has also opened up new business opportunities for some. According to the report, a convenience store chain in New York is effectively "selling" its address to others to use to get on Google in this manner.

Apparently, the more aggressive, less ethical "black hat" SEOs are seeking to take this to a new level, with new software on the way that will make it easier to bypass various attempts by Google to control this and, at the same time, use spamming engines to write fake "reviews" for these spammed "businesses."

As the report notes, there are two key areas of weakness in the way Google has implemented this:

The two phases of spamming Google Places are the insertion of fake business locations and
the creation of fake reviews. Both are embarrassingly easy using the techniques described
above.

Google Places obtains business locations from web pages created by the business itself,
advertising directories ("Yellow Pages") entries paid for by the business, and from "place
pages", also created by the business itself. There is little if any verification against objective
data sources, such as business licenses, corporation registrations, and business credit rating
services such as Dun and Bradstreet. This makes it possible to create fake Google Places
entries.

Recommendations are obtained from recommendation web sites. Most recommendation sites
allow free account creation and have little information about their members, so the cost of
creating phony identities for recommendation spam is low. Because the typical local business
has a relatively small number of recommendations, only a few phony recommendations are
needed to promote an individual business location.

Considering how much work has been done by SEO folks in just a few months, it will be interesting to see how Google responds. The company has always promoted its "anti-spam" efforts, but it sounds like not much forethought was put into the Places integration.

from the a-text-message-gathers-no-moss dept

Rolling Stone publisher, Wenner Media, has been hit with a class action lawsuit over spam text messages that were used to aggressively promote Rolling Stone, US Weekly and Men's Journal. Of course, it's not clear that this is actually illegal. The lawsuit is based on a law that forbids the automatic dialing of marketing phone calls to mobile phones, but it's not clear if that actually applies to SMS messages as well.

from the but,-don't-think-you'll-be-so-lucky dept

I have to admit that I've been noticing a lot more false positives in my email spam filter lately. Fewer actual spam messages have been getting through, but a few too many legitimate emails have been getting caught. Apparently, I'm not the only one. A group of folks who were suing AIG, and lost on summary judgment, have successfully extended the deadline to appeal after claiming that they missed the initial notice (which indicated when they needed to appeal) because it got stuck in the spam filter. The court noted that this excuse has failed in the past on numerous instances, but because this was the only real evidence of a mistake, rather than a pattern of similar mistakes, it extended the deadline. However, it did "beat up" on the lawyers as well. So, generally speaking, it's probably not a very good excuse to use... but every once in a while it might just work.

from the spam-spam-spam-spam dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about how Canadian spammer Adam Guerbuez had lost a lawsuit in the US brought by Facebook, alleging he spammed millions of accounts. He didn't just ignore the ruling; he gleefully mocked it on his own blog, playing up the huge amount ($873 million) the court awarded Facebook and referring to himself as the "$873 million man." Apparently, he didn't count on the news that a Canadian court would uphold the ruling and order him to pay. With some additional damages and the Canadian exchange rate, he apparently owes Facebook $1,068,928,721.46. I'm going to assume that this is more than he has -- though, I would imagine all of the photos on his blog highlighting himself living the good life probably won't help. In fact, now he's claiming that he's declared bankruptcy, so he's still not planning on paying. Again, all those photos on the site... might not look so good in bankruptcy court. That said, a billion dollar fine is a ridiculous amount for spam, no matter how annoying you believe spam might be.